For most Americans, the story of D-Day,
the largest and most consequential amphibious landing in history,
begins and ends with the assault on Omaha Beach. Thanks to Stephen
Spielberg, we have a powerful visceral sense of what that assault was
like, for the first twenty minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” are
both searing and convincing. But pivotal as those twenty minutes
were, they are only a small part of a lengthy and complicated story.

That story begins with the
strategic planning, which began even before the United States became
an active belligerent. The Anglo-American conversations that began
in the summer of 1941 inevitably centered on the question of how, and
where, and especially when the Western powers could regain a foothold
in German-occupied Europe. For most of two years, the wrangling
about these questions put severe strains on the English-speaking
partners, not to mention the impatience of the Russians who bore the
brunt of the land war, fighting 260 Nazi divisions along a
thousand-mile front.

Then there was the logistical
challenge. Getting two million American GIs to England across an
ocean infested with German U-boats, keeping them supplied with
cigarettes, Coca-Cola, and Hershey bars, and building the specialized
amphibious ships that would carry them across the Channel to the
invasion beaches was an enormous undertaking. Thousands of ships had
to be built, from transports to carry the men and supplies, to
escorts that would protect them from the U-boats, to large
ocean-going Landing Ship Tanks (LSTs), to the small Higgins boats
that carried them to the beach. And all this had to be done while
still more ships—thousands of them—fought the Japanese in the
Pacific. The Allied landings on D-Day took place the same month that
two U.S. Marine divisions landed on Saipan, almost exactly halfway
around the world from Normandy. These ubiquitous demands on Allied
shipping proved to be the crucial logistical bottleneck in the
invasion plan.

And finally, there were the
inevitable glitches that took place on D-Day itself. There is an old
saw among strategic planners that no plan survives first contact with
the enemy, and that proved to be true on June 6, 1944. The aerial
bombing of the beach, especially on Omaha, missed its mark; the
preliminary naval gunfire barrage was too brief; At Utah Beach, the
current along the coast put the men ashore a half mile from their
target positions; and the crowding along the shore on Omaha Beach
prevented the Naval Combat Demolition Teams from removing most of the
mined obstacles on the beach. The result of all this was confusion
and chaos.

What saved
the invasion was the ability of the men on the scene to adapt and
adjust. The Navy and Coast Guard coxswains who drove the tiny
Higgins boats, and the junior officers who commanded the larger LCTs
and LCIs, found openings along the coast where they could push
ashore. The Army non-coms and platoon commanders, finding themselves
on a beach that bore little resemblance to the one they had studied
back in England, led their men forward nonetheless, many assailing
the cliffs behind the beach, climbing hand-over-hand to assail their
tormentors at the crest. A dozen destroyers, initially charged with
protecting the armada from threats to seaward, steamed inshore to
provide timely and essential gunfire support from positions so close
to the beach that the destroyers were being hit by rifle fire.

What all this suggests is that
there were many heroes on D-Day starting with the shipyard workers
back in the States who produced the ships, the commanders who
adjusted their expectations to the reality of the moment, and
especially the young men on both the ships and on the beach, who
overcame the unexpected and triumphed anyway.